Scam of the day: compensation for recent surgeries, car accidents

Paul Muschick

In a column a few months ago, I mentioned a scam involving callers offering compensation to people who recently had surgery. Here are more details on that fraud, from a North Catasauqua woman who has fended off several of the calls.

The woman, 82, told me she received several calls, all from men and women with Asian accents, asking about her recent bladder surgery. She hung up on the first few callers because she hadn’t had bladder surgery and she figured it was a scam.

But when she got another call last week, she decided to play along to see what the callers were after.

She said the caller, a man, told her he was with the Medical Helpline Department. He said she was entitled to compensation if she’d had surgery recently. He asked if she’d had bladder surgery. She told him she hadn’t. He asked if she’d had any other surgeries. No, she hadn’t.

Not wanting to pass up the possible opportunity to rip off an old lady, the caller switched gears and asked if she’d been in a car accident. Presumably she’d be entitled to compensation for that, too. When she told him she hadn’t been, he made one final desperate attempt and asked if any of her family members had surgery or were in an accident recently.

The answer to that was no, too. The man left her a phone number and told her that she or her relatives could contact him if they did have surgery or an accident. He told her it was a toll-free number, but it wasn’t, it was a normal number in the Miami area.

I searched the number online and found pages of complaints about similar calls.

The woman told me she asked the caller if he was a lawyer, and he said he was. He said he was from Miami, but was out of the country temporarily.

I presume that if she’d told the man she did have surgery, he would have tried to wrangle some money out of her, likely by telling her she’d have to pay a fee to claim her compensation.

That's what the state attorney general's office warned about a few weeks ago. You can read that warning here.

If you get a call like this, don't take the bait. Never share your medical history with a stranger on the phone, no matter what agency name they cite. And never pay to collect any settlement.